Editorial: Double shame in curses and weasel words

Johnathan Thurston. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

Putting pressure on the referee has long been one of the less attractive features of high-stakes professional and international sport.

Rugby captains such as Sean Fitzpatrick and George Gregan were famous for it.

Manchester United are also noted for it, so much so that it provides an extra sprinkling of spice to their already considerable home-ground advantage.

Thanks to the Australians, it also infects the so-called gentlemen's game of cricket where appealing sometimes morphs into a form of verbal bullying of the officials.

Set against such low standards, the expletive-laden outburst against the referee by North Queensland Cowboys' captain Johnathan Thurston during last weekend's match against Manly may not necessarily be as bad as it gets, although it was not pleasant to see and hear.

Nevertheless, two things made it much worse.

The first was that Thurston was wrong about what happened.

His club defended him on the grounds that his emotions boiled over at the end of a tight game when he was frustrated by a forward-pass decision that went against his team.

His frustration would have been more understandable had the referee made a mistake.

But it was Thurston who was wrong: the replay shows plainly that it was a forward pass.

The second point that made it worse was the decision by the NRL judiciary to let him off a charge of bringing the game into disrepute without so much as a slap on the wrist.

It was hardly surprising that this decision was met with a torrent of criticism from other players, club officials and, importantly, parents of children who are learning the game.

Prominent among the critics was the Warriors' Micheal Luck, who said the decision set a precedent, allowing players to abuse and pressure referees with impunity.

In assessing the NRL's response to the criticism, it is hard to decide what was worse - Thurston's expletives or the official weasel words that were meant to explain away a clear failure to enforce standards and, importantly, back up the referee.

The official line was that the decision sent no general message to other players. It applied only to the particular circumstances of this incident.

That may seem like a neat way of responding to Luck's argument but if the NRL had thought twice about it, it would have realised that in defusing one bomb it has primed another.

Players and fans will be entitled to ask themselves whether the particular circumstance making this incident different was that the player spraying the abuse was one of the marquee players of the league, whose whose absence from the playing field for a week or two would certainly dull the enthusiasm of prospective members of the crowd.

Was this a privilege that might be expected by a star rather than a precedent for every player? It is no wonder Thurston was all smiles after the decision, given what he had just got away with.

His club later put out a contrite statement on his behalf that said all the right things, short of an apology.

"I certainly don't want people to think I am encouraging anyone to blow up at the referee. The refs deserve respect in any game and I respect the job they are trying to do," he said.

But the effect was rather spoiled by the club's attempt to analyse the decision.

"Johnathan was before the tribunal to answer a charge that his actions had been detrimental to the image of the game, and they were deemed not to be," said North Queensland boss Peter Parr.

Perhaps he is right. The game has had so many scandals in recent years - from salary caps to sexual shenanigans - that a few swear words could hardly make much of a difference.